Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Gould abruptly began scratching himself. He went about it unselfconsciously. He scratched the back of his neck, and then he thrust his hand inside his shirt and scratched his chest and ribs.

  ‘I should’ve been born in Boston,’ he continued, ‘but I wasn’t. My father, whose name was Clarke Storer Gould, was also a doctor. He was a Bostonian, but he had been prevailed upon to move out and practice in Norwood, Massachusetts, and he and my mother had been living there only a few months when I was born. Norwood is a fairly good-sized old Yankee town about fifteen miles southwest of Boston. It’s a residential suburb, and it also has some printing plants and some sheepskin tanneries and an ink factory and a glue works. I was born at high noon on September 12, 1889, in a flat over Jim Hartshorn’s meat market. In Norwood, by the way, that’s pronounced “Jim Hatson.” A year or so later, my father built a big house on Washington Street, the main street of Norwood. Four-eighty-six Washington Street. It had three stories and twenty-one rooms, and it had gables and dormers and ornamental balconies and parquet floors, and it was one of the show places of Norwood. There was a mirror in our front hall that was eight feet high and decorated with gold cherubim. There were beautiful terra-cotta tiles around the fireplaces. There were diamond-shaped windows at the stair landings, and they had red, green, purple, and amber panes.

  ‘As I said, my grandfather and my father were doctors, and when I was growing up I was well aware that my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps, just as he had followed in his father’s footsteps. He never said so, but it was perfectly obvious to me and to everybody else that that was what he wanted. I loved my father, and I wanted him to think well of me, but I knew from the time I was a little boy and fainted at the sight of blood when I happened to see our cook wring the neck of a chicken that I was going to be a disappointment to him, because I really couldn’t stand the idea of being a doctor; I kept it to myself, but that was the last thing in the world I wanted to be. Not that I had anything else in mind. The truth is, I wasn’t much good at anything – at home or at school or at play. To begin with, I was undersized; I was a runt, a shrimp, a peanut, a half-pint, a tadpole. My nickname, when anybody thought to use it, was Pee Wee. Also, I was what my father called a catarrhal child – my nose ran constantly. Usually, when I was supposed to be paying attention to something, I was busy blowing my nose. Also, I was just generally inept. Not long ago, looking up something in the unabridged dictionary, I came across a word that sums up the way I was then, and, for that matter, the way I am now – “ambisinistrous,” or left-handed in both hands. My father didn’t know what to make of me, and I sometimes caught him looking at me with a thoughtful expression on his face.’

  Gould stood up and took off his lopsided glasses and peered desperately at the counterman, who was evidently putting off starting on Gould’s order until he had attended to everyone else in the diner, including some people who had come in after we had sat down, but the counterman deliberately ignored him and would not let him catch his eye.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Gould went on, sitting back down resignedly, ‘when I was around thirteen, a couple of things happened that showed me pretty clearly where I stood in the world. At school, we used to do a lot of marching two by two. We’d march into assembly two by two, and we’d march out to recess two by two. I could never keep in step, so they used to put me on the end of the line and I’d bring up the rear, marching by myself. This particular day, I had been kept in after school, and the teacher had let me go to the library room to pick out a book to read, and I was alone in there and out of sight, squatting down at a bookcase in the back of the room trying to decide between two books, when the principal of the school, who was a man, came in with one of the men teachers, the math teacher. They each dumped some books down on the desk, and then they stood there for a few moments, talking about one thing and another, and all of a sudden I heard the principal say, “Did you notice the Gould boy today?” The math teacher said something I didn’t catch, and then the principal said, “The disgusting little bastard can’t even keep in step with himself.” The math teacher laughed and said something else I didn’t catch, and then they went on out.

  ‘Now, it so happened my father was on the school board and took a great interest in the school, and he and the principal saw quite a lot of each other. They were really very good friends; the principal and his wife used to come to our house for dinner, and my father and mother used to go to their house for dinner. Consequently, I was deeply shocked by the principal’s remark. It hurt to overhear myself being called a disgusting little bastard, but it was the disrespect to my father that hurt the most. “The Gould boy”! That brought my father into it. If he had just said “Joseph Gould,” it wouldn’t’ve been so bad. It would’ve confined it to me. I felt that the principal had insulted my father. I felt that he had betrayed him. At the very least, he had made fun of him behind his back. In some strange way, it made me feel closer to my father than I had ever felt before, and it made me feel sorry for him – it made me want to make it up to him. So that night, after supper, I went into the parlor, where he was sitting reading, and I said to him, “Father, I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to be, and I’ve decided I’d like to study medicine and be a surgeon.” I thought it would please him twice as much if I said I wanted to be a surgeon. “That’ll be the day,” my father said. “If you did become a surgeon, and if you performed operations the way you do everything else, when you got through with a patient you’d have his insides so balled up you’d have his heart hanging upside down and his liver turned around backward and his intestines wound around his lungs and his bladder joined on to his windpipe, and you’d have him walking on his hands and breathing through his behind and making water out of his left ear.”’

  Gould sighed, and a look of intense sadness passed over his face. ‘I held that remark against my father for a long time,’ he said. ‘Every once in a while, through the years, I’d remember it, and it would cut me to the quick. Then, years and years later, long after I had left home and long after my father had died, I was walking along the street one night here in New York and happened to think of it, and it must’ve been the first time I had ever thought of it objectively, for I suddenly burst out laughing.’

  At this moment, the waitress put a plate of fried eggs on toast and another mug of coffee in front of Gould. As soon as she turned her back, he took up a bottle of ketchup that was about half full, and emptied it on the plate, encircling the eggs with ketchup. Then he darted around to the next booth and brought back another bottle of ketchup, which was perhaps a third full, and emptied this on the plate also, completely covering eggs and toast. ‘I don’t particularly like the confounded stuff,’ he said, ‘but I make it a practice to eat all I can get. It’s the only grub I know of that’s free of charge.’ He began eating, using a fork at first but quickly switching to a spoon. ‘Sometimes I go in a place and order a cup of tea,’ he said confidingly, ‘and I drink it and pay for it, and then I ask for a cup of hot water. The counterman thinks I’m going to make a second cup of tea with the same tea bag, which he doesn’t mind: that’s all right. Instead of which, I pour some ketchup in, and I have a very good cup of tomato bouillon free of charge. Try it sometime.’ Gould finished his breakfast, and the waitress came to take away his plate. Catching sight of the empty ketchup bottles, she said, ‘You ought to have more self-respect than do a thing like that.’ ‘When I’m hungry, I don’t have any self-respect,’ Gould said. ‘Anyhow, I didn’t do it.’ He motioned with his head in my direction. ‘He did it,’ he said. ‘He turned both bottles up and drank them. You should’ve heard him. Glug, glug, glug! It was really quite embarrassing. Besides – and this is something you people can’t seem to get through your heads – I’m not just an ordinary person. I’m Joe Gould – I’m Joe Gould, the poet; I’m Joe Gould, the historian; I’m Joe Gould, the wild Chippewa Indian dancer; and I’m Joe Gould, the greatest authority in the world on the language of the sea gull. I do
you an honor by merely coming in here, and what do you do in return but bother me about such things as ketchup.’ This did not amuse the waitress. She was a portly, distracted, heavy-breathing woman, almost twice as big as Gould. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, you little rat?’ she said. ‘One of these days, I’m going to pick you up by that Joe Gould beard of yours and throw you out of here.’ ‘Try it,’ said Gould, his voice becoming surprisingly intimidating, ‘and it’ll be you and me all over the floor.’ He took a fistful of cigarette butts from a pocket of his seersucker jacket and put them on the table. As he did so, a shower of tobacco crumbs fell on his lap and on the floor and on the table, and I was afraid that he and the waitress would have some more words with each other. While she watched with disgust, Gould picked through the butts and chose one and fitted it in a long black cigarette holder. Paying no attention to the waitress, he lit it with an arch-elegant, Chaplinlike flourish, and she walked away.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘to return to the story of my life for just a minute, I finished school in Norwood and then I went to Harvard. In 1911, I graduated from Harvard, and I spent the next few years debating in my mind what I should do next. By 1915, I had about given up hope of coming to any conclusion about this matter when I somehow became interested in the subject of eugenics. In fact, I became so interested that I borrowed some money from my mother and went to the Eugenics Record Office, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, and took a summer course in eugenical field-work methods. After that, I decided I ought to put what I had learned to some use, and I borrowed a little more money from my mother and went out to North Dakota and began measuring the heads of Indians. In January and February, 1916, I measured the heads of five hundred Mandan Indians on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and in March and April I measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and then my money ran out. I wrote and asked my mother for more, and I received a telegram from her sending me my train fare and telling me to come home at once, which I did, whereupon she told me that she and my father were in financial difficulties to the point they had had to sell our house and were now renting it by the month from the new owner. It seems that some years previous to this my father had invested his own money as well as the money his family had left him in the stock of a company that had been formed to buy and develop a huge tract of land in Alaska. In other words, as smart as he was, my father had bought some gold-mine stock. And while I was out in North Dakota he and my mother had learned beyond all doubt that the stock was worthless.

  ‘Well, I didn’t see how I could be of any help to my parents, and I really had enjoyed measuring heads, so I went to Boston and called on various relatives and tried to raise money for another expedition to Indian reservations, but I was unsuccessful, to say the least. At this juncture in my life, my father took it upon himself to find a job for me. He had a friend in Boston, a Mr Pickett, who was the lawyer for an estate that owned several rows of dwelling houses in Norwood. These houses were rented by the week to people who worked in the tanneries and the glue works, and Mr Pickett offered me the job of collecting the rents. My father was tired of what he called my shilly-shallying, and I knew it was either take this job or leave Norwood. I was terribly mixed up in my feelings about Norwood. I really never had felt at home in it, but there were things about it that I liked very much, or had liked at one time. I used to like to walk beside a little river that winds along the eastern and southern edges of it, the Neponset. And I used to like to wander around in a weedy old tumbledown New England graveyard that was directly in back of our house on Washington Street. The weeds were waist-high, and you could lie down and hide in them. You could hide in them and speculate on the rows upon rows of skeletons lying on their backs in the dirt down below. And I used to like some of the old buildings downtown, the old wooden stores. And I used to like the smell from the tanneries, particularly on damp mornings. It was a musky, vinegary, railroady smell. It was a mixture of the smells of raw sheepskins and oakbark acid that they used in the tanning vats and coal smoke, and it was a characteristic of the town. And I used to like a good many of the people – they had some old-Yankee something about them that appealed to me – but as I grew up I gradually realized that I was a kind of fool to them. I found out that even some of the dignified old men that I admired and respected the most made little jokes about me and laughed at me. I somehow just never fitted in. So, little by little, through the years, I had come to hate Norwood. I had come to hate it with all my heart and soul. There were days, if wishes could kill, I would’ve killed every man, woman, and child in Norwood, including my mother and father. So I told my father that I couldn’t accept Mr Pickett’s offer. “I have decided,” I said, “to go to New York and engage in literary work.” “In that case, Son,” my father said, “you’ve made your bed and you can lie in it.” I left Norwood a few days later. I left it with a light heart, even though I knew in my bones that I was leaving it for good, except I might possibly go back in the course of time for Christmas or summer vacations or such occasions as funerals – my father’s funeral, my mother’s funeral, my own funeral. I hadn’t gone far, however, before I began having a reaction that took me by surprise. On the train, all the way to New York, I was so homesick for Norwood that I had to hold on to myself to keep from getting off and turning around and going back. Even today, I sometimes get really quite painfully homesick for Norwood. A sour smell that reminds me of the tanneries will bring it on, such as the smell from a basement down in the Italian part of the Village where some old Italian is making wine. That’s one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be – the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.

  ‘I came to New York with the idea in mind of getting a job as a dramatic critic, for I thought that that would leave me time to write novels and plays and poems and songs and essays and an occasional scientific paper on some eugenical matter, and eventually I did succeed in getting a job as a sort of half messenger boy, half assistant Police Headquarters reporter for the Evening Mail. One morning in the summer of 1917, I was sitting in the sun on the back steps of Headquarters recovering from a hangover. In a secondhand bookstore, I had recently come across and looked through a little book of stories by William Carleton, the great Irish peasant writer, that was published in London in the eighties and had an introduction by William Butler Yeats, and a sentence in Yeats’s introduction had stuck in my mind: “The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days, and in how they farm, and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage.” All at once, the idea for the Oral History occurred to me: I would spend the rest of my life going about the city listening to people – eavesdropping, if necessary – and writing down whatever I heard them say that sounded revealing to me, no matter how boring or idiotic or vulgar or obscene it might sound to others. I could see the whole thing in my mind – long-winded conversations and short and snappy conversations, brilliant conversations and foolish conversations, curses, catch phrases, coarse remarks, snatches of quarrels, the mutterings of drunks and crazy people, the entreaties of beggars and bums, the propositions of prostitutes, the spiels of pitchmen and peddlers, the sermons of street preachers, shouts in the night, wild rumors, cries from the heart. I decided right then and there that I couldn’t possibly continue to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea for the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job.’

  A throbbing quality had come into Gould’s voice.

  ‘Since that f
ateful morning,’ he continued, squaring his shoulders and dilating his nostrils and lifting his chin, as if in heroic defiance, ‘the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.’

  It was obvious that this was a set speech and that he had it down pat and that he had spoken it many times through the years and that he relished speaking it, and it made me obscurely uncomfortable.

  ‘Just now, when you told the waitress that you were an authority on the language of the sea gull,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘did you mean it?’

  Gould’s face lit up. ‘When I was a child,’ he said, ‘my mother and I spent summers at a seaside town in Nova Scotia, a town called Clementsport, and every summer an old man would catch me a sea gull for a pet, and I sometimes used to have the impression that my sea gull was speaking to me, or trying to. Later on, when I was going to Harvard, I spent a great many Saturday afternoons sitting on T Wharf in Boston listening very carefully to sea gulls, and finally they got through to me, and little by little I learned the sea-gull language. I can understand it better than I can speak it, but I can speak it a lot better than you might think. In fact, I have translated a number of famous American poems into sea gull. Listen closely!’